The present inventions are related to systems and methods for transferring information, and more particularly to systems and methods for determining problems related to a medium associated with a data transfer.
Various data transfer systems have been developed including storage systems, cellular telephone systems, radio transmission systems. In each of the systems data is transferred from a sender to a receiver via some medium. For example, in a storage system, data is sent from a sender (i.e., a write function) to a receiver (i.e., a read function) via a storage medium. The effectiveness of any transfer is impacted by any defects associated with the transfer medium. In some cases, data loss caused by defects in the transfer medium can make recovery of data from the transfer medium difficult even for data received from non-defective areas or times. Various approaches have been developed for identifying defects in the transfer medium. Such approaches provide a general ability to identify defects, but in many cases are inaccurate. In the best case, this inaccuracy limits the effectiveness of any defect identification. In the worst case, inaccurate defect detection may actually hamper the data recovery process. The inability to detect short media defects is increased where non-binary symbols are being decoded as such symbols do not exhibit independence between adjacent bits.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for defect detection.